Category Archives: travel

The good life, in Spain

I often ask myself, “what did I do to deserve this?” Not because I think I’m being punished for something undeservedly. Quite the opposite. More like – what have I done to deserve these amazing opportunities that come my way? I think this most often when traveling. Say what you will about the discomfort of today’s air travel – it’s still amazing that you can be anywhere in the world in just a few hours. We’re spoiled by an abundance of opportunity and I’m especially spoiled.

This hit me hard earlier this month as I joined a small group of journalists invited to explore the Extremadura region of Spain. I lived darned well there for eight days. Among the highlights were our nightly lodgings in six of Spain’s paradores. Started in 1928, paradors are a chain of state-run hotels that are located in historic buildings: castles, palaces, convents, etc. I found them amazing. I want to visit all 94 of them. Check them out for yourself here: http://www.parador.es

That photo above is the view that greeted me after landing in Madrid and making the 3-hour drive to Jarandilla de la Vera. First days on international trips are tough. I fight the temptation to take an afternoon nap as I find that the sooner I get back on a “daylight clock” (stay awake when it’s light, sleep only when it’s dark), the better off I am and the more quickly I adjust to the time difference. On this day, we arrived a little after 1:00 pm and I immediately set out to explore and shoot photos. I’ll share more of those images in a later post but, for now, I’ll focus on the parador itself.

Set in a 15th century palace-castle, the Parador de Jarandilla de la Vera is an imposing structure. The courtyard was what especially caught my eye, though, and I decided to make it my primary subject during those magical moments that occur right around sunset. The day was a bit blustery and it was threatening rain by the time the sun was setting. This is the courtyard as I saw it upon arrival just before 2:00 pm:

I wanted to take advantage of that brief time in the evening when the sky goes cobalt blue and contrasts so well with incandescent lighting. There were lights tucked all around the courtyard so I was hopeful that the lighting would enhance the scene come twilight.

Just after 6:00 pm, things started to happen. Even a cloudy sky will give you a blue effect just after sunset and that’s what I was counting on here. I also made a point of using my tripod and a neutral density filter to extend the exposures and give some softness to the moving clouds and central fountain. By 6:30, things were just as I’d hoped:

As it began to mist more heavily, I moved around to points of shelter to keep the rain off my lens and kept shooting:

For a first day of a trip, after an overnight flight, I’d had a pretty good day. I often feel like day one is a practice day – good only for getting ones bearings and getting in the groove of shooting in a new place. This trip seemed to come together more quickly for me and I’m happy with what I managed to make of my half-day in Jarandilla de la Vera. Which is good, because we’d be off after breakfast the next morning for more adventures in other parts of Extremadura.

Misc. Michigan

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I spent a few amazing days shooting in Michigan’s upper peninsula last week. The city of Marquette and the surrounding area offer all kinds of opportunities and I enjoyed shooting beautiful natural areas and architecture alike. Rather than try and categorize these images in some thematic or otherwise thoughtful way, I’ll just throw ’em out there and let you see a few of the places I saw.

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Simplifying the frame: Clinton birthplace home NHS

On a recent visit to the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site in Hope, Arkansas, I decided to take a different approach to my photography. It’s easy to develop habits and a common one is to see “interior” and immediately think “wide angle.” After all, I carry that wide angle for just that reason — if I’m in a tight space, I can still get it all in the frame — right?

Here’s a typical shot from starting with that mindset:

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But the more I thought about it in this case, the more I realized that the architecture isn’t the point. The real spirit of the place was in the details: the childhood photos, the everyday items, the memories. After I had all of the wide shots I needed, I popped on my new Rokinon 85mm 1.4 and took a fresh look at things. The image at the top of the post and the three that follow were all made with the 85mm.

That short telephoto view changed how I saw things. It forced me to simplify. What was a chaotic mixture of patterns through the 17mm was now reduced and dreamy — thanks to the shallow depth of field. The images felt more like I felt, when touring the house. I’ve toured a lot of presidential museums and boyhood homes but this one was more personal for me, probably due to the fact that it resembled my own boyhood home so much. It was very nostalgic for me and I think that came through in the images. I’ll definitely not disregard a short telephoto when shooting interiors from now on.

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Catching up, gearing up

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Well, the month of July seems to have slipped past me without my having ever made a single post on this blog. So sorry. Bad blogger! I’ll try now to summarize what has been a busy month, even if it involved very little travel. And interspersed are a few images from June’s trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I have a couple of other posts from Arkansas in the works, so stay tuned.

So what happened to July?

Good question. It was there and then gone. For me it’s been a month of getting caught up in the office — prepping files and sending them off to stock agencies, doing a few design projects, prepping a couple more books in my “Journals of a Travel Photographer” series — and, perhaps most importantly, getting prepared for what appears to be one of my busiest Autumns ever. I’ll post more about that as things become more finalized but, suffice it to say, I’ve been buying travel guides for multiple countries. I’m super excited about the months ahead.

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But I also didn’t want to push forward with future work at the expense of past work. I’d been getting behind in stock submissions and images don’t sell themselves when they’re just sitting on a hard drive on your desk. And, if I needed more encouragement, my stock sales are actually up this year. Alamy is the agency that I can most easily track because I can log on for immediate reports and they have been doing very well for me this year. At the midpoint of 2013, I’m about where I was for all of 2012 and my average price per sale has increased for the first time since 2009. I’m not back up to those 2009 prices, but it’s comforting and hopeful to not see image prices continuing to drop. We’ll see if the trend continues and if it’s reflected at my other agencies but, in the meantime, it felt like time to “feed the beast” and get more images out there. My backlog isn’t entirely caught up, but I’ve made progress.

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August looks to be the turning point for me and my assignment and travel schedule is quickly heating back up. I’ll try and get my blog posts caught up before I get too swamped. I have a couple of things from Arkansas in particular that I want to share before new destinations distract me. And I hope to be announcing more books in the very near future. Two are in proofreading and two more are nearly to that stage.

Then, come September, things will get really exciting around here.

SATW CS Awards

I recently returned from the Central States Chapter meeting of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), where I’m proud to say that I was awarded the 2013 Photographer of the Year Award. The photo above of a group of Swedish festival dancers in Lindsborg, Kansas, sealed the deal. It won first place in the “Action or Motion” category and was then judged best of all of the first place category winners. I don’t enter a lot of competitions but the SATW ones mean a lot to me because of all the great shooters that belong to that organization. The fact that a Kansas shot won over images made all around the world also made me very happy. For those interested in getting into travel photography, it’s a lesson that you don’t have to go to distant, exotic destinations to make interesting photographs. There is often plenty of material right in your own backyard.

Here are a few other images of mine that placed in the SATW CS competition:

This shot from Quebec City took second place in the “Places/Scenery Featuring U.S./Canada” category.

Another Kansas shot from a rodeo in Phillipsburg took third place in the “Action or Motion” category.

And yet another Kansas shot of a steak dinner at the Grand Hotel restaurant in Cottonwood Falls took third place in “Food Reflecting Local Cultures.”

I also tried my hand at my first ever Photo Shootout at the Central States meeting, held in Little Rock, Arkansas. Basically, participating photographers have 24 hours to shoot images in five categories and then a few more hours to assemble a 10-image portfolio for submission. The following are a couple of my images that placed in that competition:

This shot of the interior of the Arkansas State Capitol took first place in “Architecture.”

This shot of the Clinton Library and the adjacent pedestrian bridge took first place in “Bridges” category.

My congratulations to everyone else who won awards at our Central States meeting. It was great seeing and traveling with you all and I look forward to doing so again soon.

Spa shoot in HDR

I’m not usually a big HDR guy. The first few of those over-the-top shots I saw with hyper-dramatic clouds and impossible shadow detail were interesting, but I quickly tired of the look. But that’s not to say that all HDR is inappropriate. There are times that I find it incredibly useful, as in this shot of the Alvadora Spa at the Royal Palms in Phoenix, AZ.

The room was soothingly dim but it was quite bright outside. The client wanted to show both the interior and exterior spaces in the same shot — something that might have been a challenge back in the days of shooting transparency. Then, I probably would have waited for dusk, when it would get darker outside and I could achieve a better balance between the brightness of the interior and exterior spaces. Another alternative might have been to light the interior space to bring it closer to the exterior, but I was also interested in keeping a slow shutter speed so that the water falling on the table would be nice and silky looking.

With digital and HDR capabilities now, it really wasn’t difficult to achieve this shot, even given the massive contrast in the scene. I mounted my D700 with a 17-35mm f/2.8 zoom on a tripod and added a neutral density filter to cut even more light and get a longer exposure for the water. I then shot 5 bracketed shots, each 1 stop apart so that I had images exposed at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 stops with the middle shot being correctly exposed. The most underexposed image held detail in the bright sky and distant mountain, but the interior was extremely dark. The most overexposed shot held detail in every corner of the dark interior but had blown out portions of the exterior. Not to worry, though. This is where the HDR comes in.

With the images imported into Lightroom, I selected all 5 and opened them using the “merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop” option under the “Photo>Edit In” menu. Photoshop now did all the heavy lifting, opening all 5 images and combining them into one high-dynamic-range image that I was able to save back out as a 32bit tiff. It doesn’t look that great in Photoshop at this point, but not to worry. When that tiff was opened in Lightroom it looked and acted like any other RAW file, except that the shadow and highlight recovery sliders had much, much more information to work with and, with a few quick adjustments, I had the image you see above. Detail in the darkest shadow as well as information in the bright sky above that far mountain. By being careful not to push the contrast and clarity too far, I think I was able to avoid that unnatural look that so many think is the only purpose of HDR.

And, to rebel against the cold rainy supposedly Spring day outside my window today, I’ll leave you with a few more shots of what was a much warmer day spent at the Royal Palms in Phoenix, just a couple of weeks ago…

Phoenix – two ways

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Two different sides of Phoenix: Urban street artists working on the Calle 16 murals (above) and (below) an early morning spent in the desert biking through the McDowell Mountain Regional Park. I love this kind of contrast in a city.

Mexican Rodeo at Rancho Ochoa

The folks at the family-owned Rancho Ochoa rodeo arena in West Phoenix were kind enough to allow myself and a few others to photograph them as they prepared for their upcoming competitions. Special thanks also to Jill Richards for providing the backdrop and light modifiers that made for some fun, impromptu portrait sessions with the individual charros and charras. I loved the gold rim on the hat in the shot above and decided to try doing a little black and white toning to the rest of the image, finishing it with an aged film texture.

Here are a few others from that evening:

Season Jumping in Phoenix

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Two weeks ago, I left a cold, pre-Spring Kansas for a few days of Spring-Summer-ish Arizona. While there, I picked up an assignment that would have me hopping back on a plane just a few hours after returning home, and flying to North Dakota for three days. While it was still decidedly wintery in ND, Arizona was a welcome hint of the Spring that will hopefully one day arrive back home in Kansas (it’s a month or more late this year by my reckoning). It’s odd, jumping seasons like this. But I wouldn’t have traded that week in sunny Phoenix. Great temps, great people and fantastic locations to shoot. I’ll share a few more images over the coming week, before I have to hop my next plane.

First stop in Phoenix was the Desert Botanical Garden, where the blooms were out and it was almost possible to forget Winter ever existed:

While I took plenty of wide shots of the gardens as well, it was the details and textures that caught my eye the most. My 60mm macro lens got a real work out on this particular morning.

And, at the top of this post, a lucky shot I caught as a Flicker and another bird fought over who would be nesting in this particular cactus. Speculation on my part, but they did seem to be in disagreement over something. I was just happy to grab the photo. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

Odds and ends from Mississippi

I thought I’d post a few more shots from my Mississippi trip from late February before I get caught up with some more travel that is quickly approaching on the horizon. This first one (above) is of the Ruins of Windsor, an 1859-61 mansion that survived the Civil War, only to burn down when a guest carelessly left a cigar unattended in 1890. I’m guessing he was never invited back.

Second is the recently restored old State Capitol building in Jackson, Mississippi. I thought this was a great way to interpret the legislative space and the architecture was beautiful.

Did you know that camels were used in the American Civil War? Maybe I missed that day in school but it was news to me.

And, lastly, I loved this “Please do not touch cannonball” sign (and associated cannonball, of course) in the sitting room of a B&B in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Michael C. Snell photography blog

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